Booting from old Floppy Disk Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jason Ducharme
  • Start date Start date
J

Jason Ducharme

I recently was working on a system that had what appeared to be a standard
3-1/2 floppy disk drive installed. This drive had a brown bezel on the
front of it, but other than that it appeared to be normal with the standard
ribbon and power cable connectors.

When I tried to boot from floppy with this drive, it would only boot from my
DOS boot disk. It would not boot from my Win95, Win98, or WinME boot
diskettes. My question is, was this some kind of an "old school" drive that
won't boot these newer boot-disks, and was there a change in Floppy Drive
technology that allowed them to boot from later-generation boot diskettes?

Thanks,
Jason
 
I recently was working on a system that had what appeared to
be a standard 3-1/2 floppy disk drive installed. This drive had a
brown bezel on the front of it, but other than that it appeared to
be normal with the standard ribbon and power cable connectors.
Click to expand...
When I tried to boot from floppy with this drive, it would only boot from my
DOS boot disk. It would not boot from my Win95, Win98, or WinME boot
diskettes. My question is, was this some kind of an "old school" drive that
won't boot these newer boot-disks, and was there a change in Floppy Drive
technology that allowed them to boot from later-generation boot diskettes?
Click to expand...

Its possible its a 720K floppy drive, physically identical to 1.44MB floppy drives.

Its more likely its just a flakey drive tho. The dos boot uses much less
of the diskette. The Win9x boot floppys load various things into ram
drive and so need to read a lot more of the diskette to boot.

Its also possible that the floppys were created on different
drives and the dubious one is out of alignment, but not as
far out with the one the dos floppy was created on. The
easy check for this possibility is to see if it will boot off a
Win9x floppy written on the dubious drive. If its just out of
alignment, it should read floppys written in that drive properly.

What exactly happened with the ones that failed to boot ?

All a bit academic when floppy drives are so
cheap now. Simplest to just replace the drive.
 
I recently was working on a system that had what appeared to be a standard
3-1/2 floppy disk drive installed. This drive had a brown bezel on the
front of it, but other than that it appeared to be normal with the standard
ribbon and power cable connectors.

When I tried to boot from floppy with this drive, it would only boot from my
DOS boot disk. It would not boot from my Win95, Win98, or WinME boot
diskettes. My question is, was this some kind of an "old school" drive that
won't boot these newer boot-disks, and was there a change in Floppy Drive
technology that allowed them to boot from later-generation boot diskettes?

Thanks,
Jason
Click to expand...
Sorry, guys - my bad. It seems that the problem is not with the drive but
actually with my boot diskettes. I had a chance to tinker with the system
this evening and it would write a boot disk, and then boot from it, without
any problems. So I tried my other boot disks in another Windows box and
found that it wouldn't boot from those diskettes either. My conclusion is
that somehow my boot diskettes got damp, or too close to a magnet, or
something, and somehow got corrupted. Sorry for the false alarm, but I
guess this is the best possible outcome. Thanks for all the replies!

Jason
 
Jason said:
Sorry, guys - my bad. It seems that the problem is not with the
drive but actually with my boot diskettes. I had a chance to tinker
with the system this evening and it would write a boot disk, and then
boot from it, without any problems. So I tried my other boot disks
in another Windows box and found that it wouldn't boot from those
diskettes either. My conclusion is that somehow my boot diskettes
got damp, or too close to a magnet, or something, and somehow got
corrupted. Sorry for the false alarm, but I guess this is the best
possible outcome. Thanks for all the replies!

Jason
Click to expand...

You've reminded me of another one of those problems in the past that was a
pain in the arse. It was possible to make an emergency boot disk from
another machine on the same type of disk drive of a machine you're trying to
wake up and any slight misalignment on the machines drive would mean that it
wouldn't work. Made more painful if you traveled many miles to pick the
disk up or had it sent through the post.

Richard.
 
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